Ancient Cyprus, and the archaeology of Cyprus, on the map

Choose a period on the strip: its bar counts the sites the map draws in it, and the red part those that begin there. The island then shows that period’s sites, the paths between them, the sea lanes open at the time and the scenes set in it. Each layer has its own switch, as on the map itself. The fourth switch adds the sites of our register for the same broad period, which are still to come onto the map.

The busiest step is the Late Cypriot II, with 24 sites and 1,264 km of paths. Every site with a page opens it; every scene and period opens the full map at that place.

68 sites of 8 kinds, each with its own mark, over 17 periods. Behind them is our register of 965 sites from the Neolithic to the Roman period, of which 858 already have a position. As their pages are written, those of the periods the map covers come onto it.

The map is painted in layers, from the relief at the bottom to the sites on top. Here each layer is drawn on a sheet of its own and the sheets are pulled apart; choose one in the list to lift it. The paths shown are those of the Late Cypriot II, and the dots of the activities on the land those started by its sites.

The map has three zoom levels: the whole island, about 230 km across; a region, about 50 km; and a locale, about 5 km. Closer than that the camera stops, because finer detail could only be invented.

The second map turns from what the island was like to how we know it: who dug where and when, and where the finds went. It is being built on the same engine, with a strip of years under the island in place of the periods, a mark for each place sized by what happened there, and the old survey maps underneath the years they describe.

Here is a first look, drawn from our register of excavations: 728 projects with a known start year, from 1802 to the present, decade by decade. The busiest decade is the 1960s, with 119 projects begun. Choose a kind to see when the rescue excavations, the surveys or the work under water began.

The island’s outline comes from OpenStreetMap: a ring of 5,179 points for close views and a sketch of 1,079 for the whole island. The relief is shaded from the Copernicus 30-metre elevation model, and the same model gives the 65 rivers, traced by following water downhill from the high ground to the sea.

A site on the map is a record with a name, a position in latitude and longitude, a kind and a span of occupation, taken from its page on this site or, until the page is written, from a short entry of its own. The kind decides the mark. The span decides the periods: a site is drawn in every period its occupation overlaps, so a long-lived town such as Kition stays for many steps while a short-lived site appears in only one or two. Positions mark the excavated locality rather than the modern village.

The period boundaries are conventional round numbers. The island’s chronology is argued over at the century level, and a site dated to a boundary year may fall on either side of it. Everything that moves or is drawn as a scene carries one of two tags: documented, where the published record supports that practice at that kind of place in that period; or illustrative, a reasonable reconstruction without direct evidence there, drawn more quietly. Activities on the land belong to kinds of place and to periods, never to a single named site.

Six scenes across the map's ten thousand years, each opening the map at its place and period. The opening words are those of each scene's caption.

The map is splitting by purpose into two maps that share every place, with a switch between them that keeps your place: Ancient Cyprus, period by period, and Archaeology in Cyprus, year by year.